Practice: Your Ritual for Transformation

I remember watching the Grammy’s on TV one year.  Gosh, it must have been over a decade ago. I’d always had this magical view of artists who’d “made it” and somehow found themselves on stage at the Staples Center performing at music’s biggest night.  That year, for whatever reason, this delusional veil lifted as I realized these superstars weren’t born overnight—they worked their asses off to get there.  

I think it was an interview I read with John Mayer, who won Best Pop Vocal Album for Continuum that year.  He described basically locking himself up with his guitar for an entire year in order to master the instrument and craft that gave him entry into such grand rooms throughout his impressive career.  

His charge to aspiring musicians was simple: practice and then practice some more. Become so good they can’t ignore you.

With these trying times, responsibilities seem endless, and taking care of yourself may seem like a thing of the past. But incorporating a ritual of daily practices to calm anxiety and build healthy coping skills is preventative care we can’t afford to ignore.

As a follow up to last week’s blog post, So You Think You Should Talk to Someone? Let's Find the Right Therapist, I want to explore the power of ritual, or practice, as a way to tangibly see the desired outcomes you’ve dreamed of for a while now.  

Just like physical fitness, creative mastery, financial success, and other goals you’ve set your sight on, emotionally thriving takes practice.  We don’t show up to the gym twice a month and expect to see dramatic results.  There are several variables to consider: diet, metabolism, sleep, hydration, mindset, and most of all, consistency.  

So why do we expect to show up to therapy a couple times a month and see transformation take place?  Not to be a buzz kill, but we simply won’t.  If we want results, sure, talking about what’s not working is a good place to start.  Yet we must also start practicing a new way of living in order to experience a new way of being.  

Again, the operative word here being “practice.”  

I like to use the word ritual because it’s prettier and has this spiritual sheen to it.  In many spiritual traditions, rituals are used to create order and accentuate the sacred nature of that which is worshiped.  

Not to get too woo woo, but we are in fact soulful creatures with unique callings to inhabit while here on the planet.  That said, I believe we must treat each day as sacred, intentionally creating structure and reminders around the things that help us thrive.  

The first step in personal transformation is simple: wake up!  We must consciously show up each day in our lives and challenge the sleepy trance of forgetfulness.  After all, we make really bad decisions when we forget the truth of who we are.   

I want to support you as you create rituals in your daily experience that will help you unearth your deepest desires.  However first, you must know where you’re going. 

I’ll leave you with this simple question as a navigation tool: what do you want?  

That’s your ticket, my friend.  The answer to this question determines where you spend your precious time and energy.  It also gives you a prescription for what and how to practice.

So go dream—big and wild.  Give your fear a well-deserved day off.  You can have her back tomorrow.  For now though, sky’s the limit.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie  

So You Think You Should Talk to Someone? Let's Find the Right Therapist

As we all continue to be bombarded with stressors and general unrest, now more than ever, it’s important to assess how we’re coping individually and realize when it’s time to reach out for professional help in order to properly care for ourselves. 

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and recent protests, it’s easy to see how stress and anxiety can build to extreme levels.  But in order to navigate emotional distress, we can’t simply regurgitate past trauma and dysfunction and ignore the path for a new tomorrow.

I believe one of the greatest tools for working through your past, avoiding burnout, and embracing true transformation is psychotherapy. It is incredibly powerful for anyone seeking a deeper sense of understanding and wholeness.

Good therapists most definitely hold space to unpack the often-brutal stories of our past.  Yes, to write a compelling story with you playing the hero instead of the victim, it’s necessary to unearth expired lies and lay them to rest.  However, good therapists won’t leave you there.  

I’ve been a student of Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work for a while now.  He explores this topic neurologically and absolutely nails it.  Check this out:

“The stronger the emotion that we feel from some external event in our life, the more altered we feel inside of us as a result of that condition outside of us and the more we pay attention to the cause.  The challenge is, every time we think about that trauma, we’re producing the same chemistry in the brain and body as if it was happening again.  What that does is it activates a survival gene.  And when you’re in survival, what you want to do is make sure that that doesn’t happen again. “

When we lock into this type of survival mode, we often forecast worst-case scenarios.  Guess what?  Our brain doesn’t know the difference between the imagined state we create and reality. Therefore, we stay trapped in that old victim mentality and it tends to play out over and over again moving forward. 

Here’s my point: therapy often doesn’t work because we spend so much time talking about our past to the point we are literally reliving it.  Where focus goes, energy flows, therefore creating a habit of attention so strong and involuntary, it becomes nearly impossible to create new life-giving possibilities and successes in our lives.  How could we?  All our energy is being funneled into past emotions of survival long after the immediate threat is gone.  

My approach is different.  I’m convinced if we’re interested in creating lasting change, we need an experience to support us as a whole person, not just a cognitive one, from the neck up.  

Yes, we need a safe space to tell our stories—100%.  Yet we also need an experience of transformation as opposed to a conversation.  I believe this happens through daily practices and community.  

If you’re ready to dive right in, I’d love to support you in finding tangible breakthroughs. I’m also cooking up some resources that will be available this fall and will support your everyday experience.

Drop me a line.  I always love hearing from you.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie 

Enneagram Subtypes and My Chat with Beatrice Chestnut

May is Enneagram Exploration month here on the blog. Last Thursday, we celebrated this lavishly, kicking things off with an Instagram Live discussion on Subtypes with, as I’ve heard her called, the Grand Dame of Subtypes, Beatrice Chestnut.

Beatrice is an author of two books, The Complete Enneagram: 27 paths to greater self-knowledge and The 9 Types of Leadership: Mastering the Art of People in the 21st Century Workplace.

Both are must-reads. The Complete Enneagram is my absolute favorite comprehensive book on the Enneagram, hands down. Not only does it provide a deep dive into subtypes, but it also provides an academic overview of the Enneagram and its history.

Beatrice is also a psychotherapist and coach, training practitioners and leaders to take their Enneagram knowledge to a deeper understanding and application both in work and life.

This is my passion as well: helping people harness the transformational power of the Enneagram in their own healing, relationships, and work.

I’ll be releasing that interview later this month, yet in the meantime, I want to parse out the major takeaways of our conversation. Subtypes are, after all, a bit complex in nature, and can be easily misunderstood or glossed over.

I believe they are a game-changer, lending a whole new level of understanding into who we are and why we do the things we do.

Let me tee this up by giving a quick overview of this system:

The Enneagram can be broken down into three Centers of Intelligence: the head, the heart, and the body. Within each center, or triad, there are nine interconnected personality types. This we know. If we peel back the next layer, we discover each of the nine types is actually a triad in itself containing three more definitive subtypes within the type. So, we know there are actually 27 types as opposed to nine. The three subtypes within each of the nine types is also connected to three driving animal instincts: self-preservation, social, or sexual (or one-to-one).

Here are the three biggest takeaways from our discussion:

1. Subtypes help clarify type. Discovering type is often a difficult process. This is partly because there are only nine types and billions of us so it can feel downright limiting and often reductive to identify our dominant type as there is such variance within type. If you struggle to identify your dominant type, try on the subtypes within the types you feel closest describe you. You may discover a perfect match.
   

2. Subtypes are more helpful as a growth tool than wings. Wings are talked about much more than subtypes. I learned this is because there hasn’t been clear, compelling content written about subtypes readily available. Also, there is great confusion as The Wisdom of the Enneagram, the Riso/Hudson classic, calls them instinctual variants. Also, wings tend to be easier to identify. They are physically on either side of your dominant type. However, Beatrice explained that wings are more of a flavoring of type that can shift throughout life. Subtypes can be used in a deeper way to grow beyond limiting, unconscious behavior.
   

3. Instinct + Passion = Subtype. It’s so important to note the nuance of subtypes within each type. Like I said earlier, no two subtypes are alike even though there are the same three choices for each type. Instead, they can be explained by a person's predominant driving instinct (self-preservation, social, or sexual) fused with the specific passion, or emotional motivator, of a person’s type. This creates a distinct character type within each of the nine to really sink your teeth into. For me, this looks like the self-preservation instinct, as it is my dominant, mixed with envy, the passion of a type four.

To wrap it up and put a bow on it, I love working with subtypes because quite simply, they help us develop more balance where there is imbalance within our personality.

To learn more about the Enneagram and subtypes, join my monthly Enneagram and Self-Care program, The Practice.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

Resilience and How to Practice Joy

Are you afraid of joy? 

I know…bizarre-o question.  

Yet, after over a decade working as a therapist, I’ve had a curious finding. Humans are, indeed, scared of joy.  Beyond anger, sadness, grief, shame, you name it, we are more resistant to feel prolonged joy than other emotions.

Why is this?  

I call it “the other shoe syndrome.”  If we bask in moments of joy, small though they may be, eventually, the other shoe will drop, leaving us disappointed, or perhaps ill-prepared.  We’re so afraid of the let down that we settle for scarcity and self-protect.  

In other words, joy is too risky.  Something terrible might happen on the other side so we opt out altogether and dumb down desire.  That way, if we run tactics on worst-case scenarios, we have nothing to lose.  

After all, we have what’s called a negativity bias, or gravitation towards negative stimuli around us.  Fear has kept us alive as a species through the ages, yet we don’t really need it to stay alive in the same way our primal ancestors did.  This negativity bias has a strong evolutionary pull on our awareness, making joy more of a learned practice.   

Brene Brown says it best, “When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding.  As a result, we dress-rehearse tragedy and beat it (vulnerability) to the punch.” 

Not so fast, Cowboy.  As humans, we simply can’t opt-out of vulnerability. 

We must risk something along the way.  Expansion requires it. So does love. In both, there are no guarantees.

It’s worth noting that the goal here is not the absence of struggle.  You may have noticed lately, struggle is an integral part of life. The goal is resilience, or the ability to recover quickly from life’s challenges.

As we learn to practice joy, this opening up to hope amidst life’s challenges, guess what grows?  Yep…resilience.  

How do we practice joy?  I’m convinced it’s a three-fold process.  

When Joy flashes her tooth-y grin in your direction, don’t look the other way—get curious.  Flirt with her, even if she’s there for just a minute. 

Then what? 

Pivot to gratitude.  Research shows the most joyful people in the world are also the most grateful.  This blows far beyond circumstance. It’s a result of practice. When we pivot to gratitude instead of scarcity, we build up new accessory muscles we didn’t know existed.  This, in turn, becomes habit over time.  

In that practice of gratitude for this joyful moment—breathe it in—stay with it.  Brain science tells us it takes three deep breaths or eleven seconds to form a new neuropathway in your brain.  By basking in these joyful moments, you are literally rewiring your brain to make you a more wholehearted, receptive person. 

These simple sightings of joy are oxygen for the soul.  I think we can all agree, we need it — now more than ever.  

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

P.S. Join me on Instagram Live this Thursday at 2 pm CT to talk Enneagram Subtypes with Author, Psychotherapist, and Expert Beatrice Chestnut.  Follow me on Instagram.

Self-Compassion is the New Self-Care

One of the first questions I like to ask clients I work with takes some by surprise. It helps me steer our entire therapeutic journey. It’s simple…and very complex.

Tell me about your relationship with you?

Typically, after a long stare back at me like I have eight heads, they respond, “Um…good question. I don’t think about it much.”

Exactly. How we relate to ourselves doesn’t exactly stay top of mind. Others, more likely.

Yet how I relate to myself—how I treat, take care of, and talk to myself directly impacts everything else in life. Everything.

Why? Because I can’t live and give out of an empty vessel.

Back in early February, (which seems like 12 years ago right now), I hosted a Self-Care Workshop alongside two dear friends. It was powerful because we realized how desperate our souls, especially as women, are for deep, true self-care.

I’m not talking mani-pedis and facials and wine nights with the girls. Those are all fabulous and can be nurturing, but let’s call a spade a spade. Those are forms of pampering…and pampering is a good thing! Yet we’ve sold self-care short if we deem it expensive beauty treatments and indulgences, especially right now. We approach it as a luxury—the stuff that ensues out of an abundance of time, energy, and resources.

And yet I firmly believe the less of those three resources we have, the more important it is to fight for self-care.

Actually, I’d like to rebrand self-care as self-compassion because I feel self-compassion looks more like true, life-giving self-care than spa treatments do. So what is self-compassion?

Self-compassion is the practice of befriending ourselves. It’s learning to think of, talk to, and treat ourselves with kindness and compassion like we would do a friend we deeply care about.

Self-compassion also takes notice of some important things.

1. It recognizes our hurt and suffering.

2. It moves towards this pain with a kind and open heart instead of trying to fix it, shame it, or numb it.

3. It is built on the foundation that the human condition is fragile and this frailty is the connective tissue that binds us all together.

Guess what? Whereas “self-care” in a traditional, indulgent context is tough for most of us right now, self-compassion is available and necessary at every turn. (Oh, and free!) I mean, raise your hand if your hair color has faded, your grey’s are popping, and you forgot where you last saw your makeup?

History has presented us with the perfect space and time to practice true self-care or self-compassion. I’ve got great news for you too!

Coming in May, you will get the opportunity to participate in our Online Self Care Workshop…for free! We’ve created an abridged version of the live weekend event and are bringing it to your living room. Stay tuned for more details and other free resources right here.

We’ve got an incredible opportunity right now to dig deep, love ourselves, and love our people well. I love supporting you in this process.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie